


space for another

by greenbucket



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, F/M, Gen, M/M, Matchmaking, Pre-Relationship, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:35:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26208022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbucket/pseuds/greenbucket
Summary: Katara's never realised how few places there are to look in a sleeping pod when you’re trying to avoid the entire bed area and not look like you’re avoiding looking.
Relationships: Aang/Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 26
Collections: Zutaraang Week





	space for another

**Author's Note:**

> for zutarang week day 7: stars.

When Katara wakes up, she knows straight away something’s wrong. As far as ships go, APPA isn’t a particularly cranky or noisy one, his hum of engines and mechanics as they hurtle through space easily fading to background noise. Now, there’s a worrying intermittent grinding sound of metal against metal, and her sleeping pod is freezing. The room is pitch black, no lights from the temperature maintenance systems.

A hand in front of the vents confirms it: only sparse, weak gusts of warmish air that do nothing to alter the room overall.

“APPA? You okay?”

The ship groans in response and more air puffs out of his vents like an unhappy sigh. Katara pats the wall of her pod soothingly. “No, you’re not feeling well at all, are you? Poor thing.”

APPA groans pitifully again.

Katara feels the exact same. She would give anything to lie back down and catch some more sleep; they’d only come out the other side of a tricky belt of asteroids and all manner of ship-destroying material not long ago. Stretches like that were never exactly fun (unless your name was Toph) but this particular one had been an experience so harrowing and adrenaline-fuelled they’d _all_ left APPA on automatic and gone to bed as soon as Sokka gave the all clear.

As it is, their spaceship is possibly about to fall apart, so Katara, shivering, pulls herself out of bed, into her slippers, and onto the walkway.

It’s warmer out on the walkway than her pod, but Sokka and Toph’s sleeping pods are still all the way down the other end of it. It’s a distance that seems to stretch miles as Katara sleepily regards it. Across the way from her own pod is Aang’s. That makes her decision for her; Sokka and Toph might be the ones with the most know-how on the mechanics side, but APPA is more than a ship and he’s Aang’s through and through.

Also, his sleeping pod is right there.

Aang hasn’t ever been one for locking his door’s security protocols, so when Katara presses her palm against it it opens smoothly. It’s the right temperature inside but it's dark too, with only the pale blue lights of the pod’s functioning thermostat to see by. “Aang? Sorry to wake you–”

“Katara?”

There’s not much room to move in a pod to start with, but Katara freezes. She can hear Zuko fumbling to turn on the overhead lighting, his lack of familiarity with Aang’s pod giving her a moment of grace to pull herself together. Not that it’s something she should need to pull herself together from – so she’d forgotten that Aang and Zuko, as a couple now, might like to share pods now and again, and she’d just barged in like it was old times. No big deal.

She hears Aang laugh in the dark. “Oh man, Zuko, stop that. Let me.”

The light turns on and Katara is treated to the sight of Aang and Zuko half sitting up and mostly wrapped up in each other, Aang closest to her and still smiling at Zuko’s struggle with the switch, Zuko on Aang’s other side and his bedhead immense. The urge to join them, climb into the space between them, hits Katara like a wave.

“Oh. Sorry,” she says for lack of a single better thing to say. Katara’s never realised how few places there are to look in a sleeping pod when you’re trying to avoid the entire bed area and not look like you’re avoiding looking.

“Don’t be sorry,” Aang says, like it’s as simple as that. Like she hasn’t walked in on them cuddling in their sleep. Which is fine, but not for someone outside to see, such as herself because they’re together, and together not with her. “What’s up?”

Katara forces herself to look back at them. Aang is sitting up properly now, but Zuko’s gone in the other direction and laid back down fully, half hidden behind Aang. Both of them appear one too-long blink away from sleep.

“The temperature control in my pod is down,” she says, feeling awkward even though it’s a legitimate problem. “It’s too cold in there to sleep. I didn’t want to wake up Sokka or Toph, but I thought you should know.”

APPA, though generally far less wheezy sounding from inside Aang (and Zuko’s) pod, makes a creaky sound of agreement. Aang listens to this thoughtfully and lays his hand on the wall, the same as Katara had in her pod.

After a moment or two of communing with his ship, Aang declares, “He seems okay to me.”

APPA moans his disagreement this time. Aang frowns, listening again, and Zuko starts to sit upright, concerned.

“Maybe we didn’t make it out of the belt as cleanly as we thought?” Zuko suggests, and it takes Katara a moment to realise he’s voicing this to her, rather than interrupt Aang. Things have been weird between them since he and Aang got together. If Katara wasn’t secure in the knowledge she’s the one who gets to feel jilted about the whole arrangement, she’d say he was avoiding her.

“Maybe,” she agrees. She’s too tired for this; they all are. “Really, it’s not a problem. It’s clearly just mine, so I can go set up one of the spare pods and we can look at it after we’ve all got our rest.”

Aang breaks off his silent conversation with APPA at this point to look affronted and say, “Don’t be stupid, that’ll take ages and we’ll waste resources cleaning it afterwards. Just get in here with us.”

“In here?”

“Uh,” Aang says, flushing a little as his own words register. He shares a glance with Zuko that’s too quick for Katara to overanalyse. “Yeah. If you’re… all right with that?”

“It’s late,” Zuko adds, before Katara can reply. He pushes the covers back, as if to prove there’s enough space in the bed for another person.

And there is. Katara can envisage exactly how pleasantly cosy it would be, an idea so appealing for so many reasons – the main one at that moment being she is _so_ tired and still shivering – that all idea of turning it down vanishes. “Okay.”

One of them turns off the overhead lights as Katara takes off her slippers and places them by Aang and Zuko’s. The sight of that alone had been illicit thrill enough, so it’s probably for the best that it’s dark when she clambers over Aang and fits into the space between him and Zuko. There’s another thrill in the fact that apparently they’d all had the same vision of how this particular sharing would go.

For a moment once she’s settled, the three of them lie there flat on their backs and Katara thinks it’s fully possible the strangeness and various unspoken feelings might suffocate them.

It lasts until Aang yawns wide enough his jaw cracks and turns on his side to get comfortable, and Zuko’s foot brushes Katara’s leg under the covers when he’s clicking his ankles grossly. Katara smiles in spite of herself and lets herself relax. They’re practically as wrapped up in each other as Aang and Zuko had originally been when Aang pats Katara’s head, clearly aiming for the wall, and says, “We’ll fix you up in the morning, don’t you worry buddy.”

Katara is almost asleep again in the warm cocoon of the bed, but she’s pretty sure APPA just hums happily this time, no hint of a groan.

\---

The next morning at breakfast, Katara skilfully mentions APPA’s malfunction without mentioning the solution she’d found to avoid freezing to death in her sleep. Even though the problem does seem to have been localised entirely within her sleeping pod, it’s worth mentioning.

Toph heads off down the walkway with her food in hand to investigate, despite Katara’s protests that it can wait. “If we’re about to depressurise and instantly blow up and die in the void of space, I want a little warning, don’t you?”

Sokka watches Toph’s retreating figure with reproach. “Blowing up. At _breakfast.”_

Toph returns a minute later, food uneaten.

“Quick diagnostics,” Sokka remarks around the massive mouthful of food he can’t have been that put off of. “What’s it look like?”

Toph puts her bowl down with a splatter and kicks her feet up on the breakfast table and Katara makes a specific choice to not say anything. If her pod _does_ need fixing– well, after last night she’s in no rush, but also Toph is the best mechanic this side of the universe.

“Well, I can’t say what it _looks_ like, but what it feels like, Katara, is that APPA has played you.”

The background hum of APPA’s systems go suspiciously silent. MOMO, their mobile robot assistant, goes still.

Katara can’t help but laugh at the suggestion. “Played me?”

Toph shrugs. “That room was toasty warm, not a single thing wrong with the system. Wait, come on. You’ve really never had APPA try and push you out of a room before?”

Katara shakes her head. “No.” Why would APPA try and get her to leave her sleeping pod?

Sokka nods and says sagely, “Not Katara, she’s too much of a goody two sh-"

He cuts off with a yelp when Katara kicks him under the table.

"No fighting," Aang chides automatically, no force behind it.

Zuko takes one look at what Katara thinks of as Sokka's whiney face forming and, in a surprisingly smart choice, asks teasingly, "So is this you two coming out as the ones using up all the hot water?”

" _No_ ," Sokka gasps, outraged. "How could you say that?"

“I won’t deny it," Toph replies, shrugging again and unrepentant. "But how would you know about APPA’s little trick for that if you weren’t just as guilty, huh?”

Zuko holds his hands up, conceding, and the conversation moves on. But Katara can’t move past the idea that APPA kicked her out of her own pod on purpose. Not only is she a little hurt, because he may be a ship and Aang’s but she thought they were friends, it’s also just so _confusing_.

Across the table, Aang has been very quiet. When Katara looks, he’s caught in a staring contest with MOMO. From what she can tell, MOMO loses a moment later (insofar as a robot can lose a staring contest), and Aang goes through several expressions in rapid succession before settling on torn.

“APPA,” he begins, his Captain of The Ship voice on now, which shuts them all up, “I won't be mad, but did you override all your protocols to make Katara's room too cold to be in just so that she'd–?”

Only Aang doesn’t get to finish the question because MOMO chooses that moment to go bezerk, fling half the kitchen equipment across the room and start shrieking.

Toph and Sokka leap into action, chasing after MOMO and shouting back and forth diagnostic possibilities, but Katara's mind is whirring. Huh. She looks between Aang and Zuko, both frozen at the table like she is, and catches them giving her the same furtive glances.

 _Huh_. Katara decides then and there that no matter how it turns out, even if things are more awkard than before, they absolutely can’t brush off talking about things again like they did this morning. The possibility that APPA, a literal _spaceship_ , is starting to meddle in their business is embarrassing beyond words.

Maybe it’s just because of the suspicion now blooming in her mind, but Katara is pretty sure when MOMO has stopped freaking out and they’ve finally got the kitchen shipshape again, APPA’s background engine humming sounds a little more smug than usual.


End file.
